In his childhood he liked skating and he was very good at it. His parents dreamed that he would become a well-known athlete or a military man in the future. He was a favorite child, grandmothers and grandfathers were pampering him: they took him to sea resorts and tried to fulfil his every desire. It was hard to imagine that one day Sergiy would become a criminal and get into prison ....
Life went downwards during his teen years. His father left his mother and Sergiy without even explaining why. This caused an unbearable pain in Sergiy’s heart. No matter how hard his mother tried, she could not fill the emptiness in his heart. She was constantly ill. At that time he met a bad company. His new friends taught him to smoke, to drink and to steal. Eventually, he got into a jail.
When Sergiy left the prison, he found out that his father had died, and his mother died shortly afterwards from her illness. He became an orphan. He had to decide what to do next. After the first term in prison he concluded that "it is possible to live even there quite well". In order not to be different from others for the first time in his life he tried drugs offered to him by a friend.
Initially Sergiy felt that being high on drugs did bring him some relief. He also never heard of anyone dying from drugs. During those violent 90s he became a member of a criminal gang.
"I lost all moral values. Everything I was thinking about was how to cheat someone for money, how to get as much as possible for myself." The worst thing is that I thought that this was normal. I considered myself a cool guy," Sergiy Melnychenko recalls.
Selling drugs was one of the ways he made money. Because of drug addiction he lost control over his life. He decided to break the power of drugs by another addiction. Despite large amount of alcohol he was consuming, he still would always go back to drugs. Because of all of this, he was very mentally unstable. He was constantly on the verge of life and death. With such life style dangers were present at every step of his life. There were plenty of situations when he could die, but for some reason he stayed alive. As he found out later, Sergiy’s grandmother prayed for him all the time.
One day Sergiy met an old friend with whom he was involved in various robberies. That guy became a Christian and changed his life. He invited Sergiy to a church, but Sergiy refused to come.
"I thought that God was a fiction, a religion. I had no faith in Him at all, but my friend kept praying for me," Sergiy says.
Sergiy spent all his life in fear. He kept thinking that one day he would have to give an acсount for all he had done. This is why he decided to call his Christian friend.
It turned out that his friend was a founder of a Christian rehab center. Sergiy went to that center with the last hope that God may somehow change his life.
After spending some time there, his life changed. This could be confirmed by his aunt. But later, unfortunately, he returned back to drugs. After his last detention, he went to Fastiv to his aunt and he continued to drink a lot. Sergiy suffered from аlcohol withdrawal delirium, tried to hide from people. At the end, Sergiy finally decided to return to God.
he added. When in desperation he turned to God for a second time, his life changed dramatically. As he says:
Now Sergiy is 48 years old and he has a job that he really likes: he works at construction business building apartments. He also sings in a church choir. From a simple construction worker God has raised him to the level of foreman in charge of the team of about 30 people. He reconciled with his relatives, and
Now he looks for his old friends who do not know God and tells them that there is hope.
Sergiy Melnichenko says at the end of his story.